


Turning Pages

by lcwilkie



Category: Doctrine of Labyrinths - Sarah Monette
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-09
Updated: 2019-09-09
Packaged: 2020-10-13 02:30:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,706
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20574977
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lcwilkie/pseuds/lcwilkie
Summary: Felix encourages Mildmay to learn a new skill while whiling away the cold hours at Grimglass. Mildmay takes it further than expected.





	Turning Pages

**Author's Note:**

> So! Wrote this on a whim, fact-checked approximately nothing, only slightly edited cause I've been staring at computer screen all week but want to get it posted. I also haven't read the books in a while, so while the characterization might not be perfect. So, sorry if anything doesn't make sense! (If that's the case, let me know....yay editing tools!)

**— Felix —**

I came home in a foul temper. The combination of weather, vainglorious and unresponsive students, and a tear in my favourite jacket had not put me in the best of moods, and I walked in the tower at Grimglass knowing Mildmay would bear the brunt of my frustration, but in that moment, not caring.

My mood was not improved by the room being nearly as dark as the storm clouds outside, or cold. I called my witchlights, and by their light saw Mildmay sitting in a chair by the fireplace, the last few dying logs flickering sluggishly.

“Is there any particular reason you have neglected the fire, and the candles, and what I assume was your cup of tea, before it was left to stagnate into sludge?” I asked waspishly.

He didn’t react instantly, which gave me a brief moment of hesitation. Even when he was trying not to react when I was awful, I could usually see his shoulders tense, but there wasn’t even that.

It wasn’t until he slowly raised his head and I saw his face that my temper vanished. I had never, ever seen Mildmay with that look of blank shock in his eyes.

“Mildmay?”

I saw him blink, focus on me, look around at his surroundings, flush slightly, and get up to put another log in the fireplace.

“Sorry,” he mumbled, “got lost in thought.”

I walked over to the chair he had been sitting and lifted what he’d put on the seat when he stood up.

It took me a moment to lift my eyes from it and catch his from where he stood awkwardly in front of the now warmly flickering fire.

“Oh.”

**— Felix —**

“Mildmay,” I said, trying to hold onto my temper, “literacy is based around the principles of reading _and writing_. The second part is just as important as the first.”

“Don’t see why I gotta do it. Not like I need to write a shopping list,” he mumbled, doing his best to slur the words past unrecognizability.

I took a deep breath in through my nose, trying not to snap at him. I knew he wasn’t being stubborn on purpose, that he was still, despite learning to read, terribly shy about his lack of proper education. But we had been going around in circles for days now. I was adamant that he should learn to write as well as read, and he was finding any excuse he could to not to. I was at the end of my patience.

“And what if you do? The housekeeper falls ill, you get the winter fever, and I have to do the shopping?” I asked.

He looked at me, green eyes gone hard and cold, “Why the fuck am I writing a shopping list if I have the winter fever? ‘Sides, you’d just flirt with the town, or ask Kay, and everyone’d be lining up to invite you to dinner.”

“Fine!” Exasperated, exhausted of this argument, I threw my hands up in the air. “If you don’t want to learn to write, that’s just fine. If you want to go no further than the bare minimum and never amount to anything else, that’s just fine. But I’m going to work, where I at least get paid for trying to bash knowledge into ungrateful heads!”

And with that, I stormed out. Early for work, for once in my life, I wasn’t ready to face the confined halls of the university. The Grimglass branch was housed in a small, squat building made out roughly hewn stone, apparently dating back hundreds of years to the time when fortification was more important than aesthetics. Most days I was alright with the confined hallways and low roofs, but today the thought of spending more time than necessary in the dark, sparsely windowed building was unpleasant. To many memories of arguing with Mildmay in the Mirador.

I stomped my way to the moors northwest of the lighthouse, where the wild hills and heather wouldn’t judge me for my temper. It was a trick I’d learned after only a few weeks in Grimglass. If I wanted to avoid people, or the endless sound of the sea, or the memories of my past as everyone stared at the brightly dressed red headed Melisine wizard, go to the moors. No one bothered others there, and the sheer diversity of flora and fauna was usually enough to shake me out of bad moods. It would be today, as well, I knew. I was already feeling guilty for snapping at Mildmay. Not enough to go back and apologize, but I knew I’d been unfair. I was still furious, but able to focus instead on the mix of greens and blues and purples and greys of the countryside. It was a kind I’d never seen back in Melusine, or Troia, or Kekropia, or anywhere else I had been, and therefore a kind that had no negative connotations with. Breathing deeply, I continued my walk, taking the long way to the university. With any luck, by the time I got there I’d be in a better mood, and possibly even late enough to make a grand entrance and discomfit Professor Hildebrand.

**— Mildmay —**

Now, you gotta understand, I didn’t do it for Felix. Or because of anything Felix’d said. Not exactly. It was more that Keeper — that _Kholkis _had once said something similar, something about me never amounting to anything no matter what I did, that got me to pick up that pen. I’d listened to Kholkis for a long time, and it took a lot longer to realize she’d lied about a lot of things. Like me being too stupid to learn to read. I still wasn’t facing that straight on, not since Felix and id had that conversation about how she’d said that but meant the opposite, and it wasn’t that I was too stupid to learn to read but too smart and if I’d learned I wouldn’t have needed her that long, cause that wasn’t really something I was quite willing to face yet. That poor stupid Milly-Fox believed whatever he was told and didn’t want to think for himself.

But being reminded of Kholkis and her using me and the contrast that for fucking once Felix wasn’t trying to made me figure it was worth a shot.

And the results weren’t pretty. I mean, there were letters on the pages, eventually, but they were all different sizes and the lines were about as straight as Felix in a roomful of molly whores. The pen didn’t want to cooperate neither. It was all blotchy and sometimes too thick where I’d pressed too hard and sometimes too thin where I’d tried to not break the tip.

But I got that whole damn passage down on the paper like Felix’d been nagging at me to do. It was ugly, but I ain’t no prize to look at either but that don’t mean I don’t got value (another awkward not-argument with Felix, where I’d both tried to convince him that what he’d done in the past didn’t matter to him being worth something and him pointing out the same about me).

_Fuck it, _I thought, and left the pages where they were and went to the main room. The holes in my trousers weren’t getting any more patched for me sitting staring at wobbly letters.

When Felix got home after teaching at the university - and no matter how much he complained about it, it made him happy - and saw the paper sitting there, all he had to say was “when you get a chance, the next section on the lifestyle onboard the ships is also very interesting,” and I knew he wasn’t mad at me.

It wasn’t till class at the Society chapter in Grimglass (about ancient rights to honor the dead, which Felix signed me up for “because at this point we might as well have some academic knowledge rather just our practical experiences,”), and I was telling the other students the story of Jean-Elise and her ghost lover Dominick that I considered throwing Felix into the fireplace next chance I got. Cause Ms. O’Donnell walked in just as I got to the part about Jean-Elise weaving a necklace of hemp and nightshade to put around Dominick’s gravestone and asked if I could write down the story for her to use in the curriculum. I just about bit my tongue when she did. Made some comment about maybe later, and thought that would be the end of it. But of course, then I couldn’t get it out of my fucking head. That I could write down the stories I knew. And fuck Felix for making me think that was an option. I could copy things, sure, but my grammar ain’t much better than it ever was, and no one would want to read stories where they didn’t know what was happening cause the words were the wrong ones, or in the wrong place.

And my writing was still shit. The Society didn’t go in for written work much, along of the teachers being mostly volunteers and having their own stuff to do, and the students being busy. But Felix was still lending me that copy of _Ygressine Vessels _to copy from, and if I could learn to read, well, then, maybe I could learn to write, too. And I mean, I _could_ write, but not so as anyone with any kind of education would look at it and not laugh and know it was someone who hadn’t even been able to write anything other than his own damn name up until about six months ago. But I was a fuck of a lot better than I was back then, and I guess I figured that if I could get better by only sort of practicing, it might be worth it to keep trying.

So that’s why I waked into Ms. O’Donnell’s office a few weeks later with a stack of papers with stories written on ‘em. The first one was Jean-Elise and Dominick, cause that’s what Ms. O’Donnell had asked for and I didn’t know if she’d even be interesting in the others, but Kethe help me if I was gonna do this I was gonna do it proper.

“Mildmay! What a delight. How are you finding the class so far?”

“Um. It’s good,” I said. I could feel myself start to blush, and Kethe, I felt like a kid again hoping for Keep—Kholkis’s approval for something I’d done right. “Hey, listen,” I started, hoping to get it over with.

I looked up at Ms. O’Donnell, who had put her pen down and was looking at me with her hands folded in her lap and her head tilted to one side, like she was actually interested in what I had to say, which gave me the confidence to finish.

“I wrote down that story. And a couple others. Just in case, y’know, anyone else might be interested.” And I was looking at them papers in my lap, holding them tight enough all the scars on my hands stood out like a fucking carnival tent in the courtyard of the Mirador, wondering just what the fuck I thought I was doing. 

“Really? Marvelous, may I see?” and she reached for those papers and I just about stood up and walked out of the room with them. See, I hadn’t even told Felix what I was doing. He thought that all I was dong was copying down the passages from _Vessels_ when we was working on whatever it was he did at his end of the table, and I mean I was, but not religiously. So having someone actually look at them stories, as best I could remember them, was damn near one of the hardest things I’d ever done.

“If…if you don’t want ‘em, or need ‘em or anything, that’s fine too. I mean, I won’t be hurt or nothing. Just thought….well, that you’d asked for a copy, so there it is.”

But she wasn’t listening to me, she was flipping through those pages that I’d tried to keep organized, with big headings at the top of each new story, like the chapter headings in Felix’s books, and page numbers, and whatnot. And she got to the end of the stack, and I dunno, there was only about four stories in there, not all about the dead, only the one was. I’d tried to keep ‘em mostly nice-like and not get into any of the real nasty stuff from the Boneprince or about Vey or Porphyria Levant, but most of the stories I knew were pretty nasty stuff.

And when she was done flipping through the stack, she just looked at me and asked “Have you considered writing a book?”

**— Felix —**

And so there we were, standing in a small, circular room in the base of a lighthouse thousands of miles from Marathat, holding a book bound in blue leather, with gold embossing on the front reading _Tales from Melusine_, with, in slightly smaller letters, _Compiled By Mildmay Foxe_ below the main title.

“Ms. O’Donnell, she passed the one’s I’d written down onto a printer friend of hers. Um. He liked them, and asked if I’d write more. So I….did. And they made them into a book. I got the first copy, but, um, others are being sent to different stores this week.”

Mildmay explained, still looking a little shell-shocked. I was feeling rather surprised, myself. I hadn’t heard a word of this from him.

“How long were you working on…writing a book?”

“Dunno. Maybe a couple months.”

“A couple months. And you didn’t tell me.”

He blushed and looked down, and at this point I knew him well enough to immediately follow up with “I wouldn’t have laughed. I promise. I’m, well, actually, I’m quite proud.”

He looked up at that, again looking wary, and as though he didn’t quite believe me. “No, really,” I told him. It was imperative to me that he understood. “It’s rather an impressive feat, to write a book. Goodness knows I’ve never managed to. Else I’d have made you read that, just to increase my ego.”

That got one of his almost smiles, where it was just a lightening of his eyes. “Yeah, well.”

“May I read it?” I asked, which for some reason made him blush furiously once again, and look away. “Mildmay, it’s a book. They are supposed to be read, yes?” and then it occurred to me he might have compiled stories I’d heard or he didn’t think I’d want to, so it was in a much smaller voice when I asked “Unless you’d rather I didn’t?”

Mildmay just took a deep breath, and I could see him bracing himself. I closed my eyes, waiting for the worst, with Malkar’s voice in my head purring _why should I let you, darling? _the way he did when I’d asked to learn something new, and breathed out a sigh of relief when Mildmay said “I don’t mind.”

“The thing is…” he said, and I opened my eyes to see him fidgeting awkwardly with Jashuki, which he didn’t do, and just raised my eyebrows at him.

“The thing is….” I prompted.

“Well, I thought you might…I was planning on giving it…Oh, fuck this for the emperors snotrag,” Mildmay said, and walked over to where I was still holding the book. “Here,” he said, flipping to just past the interior cover. “I’m gonna make more tea.”

I watched him walk away, shoulders tense like he was expecting a verbal lashing from me. Baffled, I looked down at the dedication page, where it read, for everyone with a copy to see:

_For Felix,_

_Thank you._

_For everything._

I looked back up at my brother, who’d dragged my across a continent, lost his mobility and home and friends because of me, been exiled with me, and felt that he had reason to thank me. I felt my eyes burn. Clutching the book tight, the first though in my mind was that if I ever got exiled again, and had to pack light, it would be the first thing in my bag.


End file.
